William Giraldi Next Stop Abbottland: The Stories of Lee K. Abbott he best fiction writers and dramatists construct worlds with such expertise T of purpose and innovation that it’s impossible to confuse those worlds with any others. Samuel Beckett’s environment might resemble no place on earth, but we return to it again and again because it matches precisely our interior landscape. What makes Beckett—and others such as William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor—impossible to confuse with another writer is original- ity of purpose, or vision. A fiction writer’s purpose does not lie in his theme, since the only theme available to him is the plight of Homo sapiens; this is what Henry Fielding meant when he wrote in Tom Jones that man, not God, “is the highest subject.” Whether the plight of our species is viewed through the colored glass of class, race, sex, or religion is really beside the point, because all literature is about either the defeat or the triumph of the human spirit. A writer’s particular purpose reveals itself through the manner in which he or she processes those opposites and lays bare the heart in conflict. Since pur- pose cannot be revealed through theme, it must be revealed through style—a condition the poets share. Syntax and diction, and how they contribute to characterization, are the marks of a story writer’s purpose. Whereas a poet’s mode is in most cases primarily lyrical, a fiction writ- er’s is narrative: he has a story to tell, a story about men and women strug- gling against the grate of existence, against all things known and unknown. No struggle, no story; we are not interested in hearing about a purely happy day. Our American short story writers practice a form perfectly suited to this struggle: most of our lives are not perennial travesties but rather an accumula- tion of a hundred separate events marked by bliss and pain. These episodes may [ 69 ] 70 the georgia review last an hour, a day, a week, a month—or twenty pages for the story writer. A novelist concerns himself with a life, a story writer with the most meaningful chapters from that life. When Lee K. Abbott arrived on the scene in 1980 with his story collection The Heart Never Fits Its Wanting, American short fiction was about to get a makeover courtesy of the so-called minimalists: early Raymond Carver via Gordon Lish, the scoured sentences of Richard Bausch, and the Richard Ford of Rock Springs. Later, Amy Hempel and Frederick Barthelme would carry on the mode of minimalism, which Hempel preferred to call miniaturist. I have no quarrel with the term minimalist because it was always meant to denote style instead of substance, though Hemingway, the most minimal of them all—what is his iceberg theory if not a call to minimalism?—never had to contend with such a label. Borrowed from modern art, this label came to apply to American short fiction partly in reaction to the excess of the Reagan eighties, those unashamed glory days of capitalism and the Star Wars program. John Barth was at the head of a pack who applied the term with unadulterated praise, especially in his 1986 essay “A Few Words about Minimalism.” With the cold war winding down, there was still much talk of plutonium and mutual annihilation, and some of what Carver, Bausch, and Ford aimed to achieve was a reemphasis on the little American heart in the little American home. John Cheever’s and John Updike’s emphases were similarly fixed, though always in a style that suggests the intel- lectual and rhapsodic. The minimalists favored a more mainlined approach to emotional truths, unencumbered by the acrobatics of the Updike syntax. Lee K. Abbott would have nothing of this. The Heart Never Fits Its Want- ing is an orgy of style, one that performs the magic trick of being at once ine- briated and exact—his narrators akin to world-class drinkers who can down a fifth of Jim Beam and still stand straight. Abbott has often been compared to Cheever, but this is a mystery to me because their sensibilities as story writers are wholly apart, the classes of their characters at nearly opposite ends of the social spectrum. Most of Abbott’s narratives serve his language, and though this is typi- cally the crime of a beginning writer who wants to demonstrate his vocabulary and what he recently learned in philosophy class—usually about Nietzsche—in early Abbott the inversion is the point: without language our stories don’t exist. Like a genuine poet, Abbott wants to create a new mode of communication, william giraldi 71 and if that communication is zany and reckless then so is the human heart. Less is not more; more is more, replete with abstractions, metaphysics, and mayhem: Death. Say the word a dozen times and you’ll see that it will mean as little to you as gibberish in French or what machines speak. Sung as we used to sing about what we thought was love in those days, it will no more touch you than trouble among South Pole penguins or quar- rel across town; it will seem to you now as it seemed to me then—a condition fetched up to disturb the small minds we celebrate. Imitative form is a fallacy in certain instances, the mode of lazy pens and impoverished imaginations: the writer’s main character withholds information from her husband, and so the writer withholds information from the reader; the character’s thoughts are a muddled mess, and so too is the writing. A fic- tion writer who would make such defenses is not worth listening to in the first place, yet for Abbott the feverish pace of his sentences, the alliteration and unorthodox syntax, are successful corollaries to the motives and inner bedlam of his characters. Originality of character begets originality of language. Abbott is a generous writer seemingly incapable of error, and so imitative form aug- ments the energy of his narratives, which are revelatory and fun. Remember when reading was fun? This is from the story “Love Is the Crooked Thing,” told by an aging football player, Burl Purteet, who has just met the woman he will marry: Time moved on as it will in my world, and in August I went into another Baldwin-Wallace training camp, that beef of me much older, my knees held fast by gizmos of stainless steel and miracle fabric; and I thought little about Ms. DuFoys until that afternoon, during two- a-days, when three from the Blue squad, including a lunatic rookie who desired to be the new edition of yours truly, sought to batter old Burl’s kidneys and shiver his thinking parts so that Number 56 would go down in a pile the size of an economy sedan. Exaggeration is the machine of the comic, and Abbott, for all his seri- ousness and squalor, is primarily a comedic writer who delights in the folly that is man. In the Southwest of The Heart Never Fits Its Wanting, Abbott’s women say things like “I’m a journalist. I specialize in grief and overcoming,” and his men announce, “I’m bear and snake. I live apart from grace.” His New 72 the georgia review Mexican isolatos have no trouble approaching unknown women on the street and declaring, “I love you. Here, feel my face,” and then afterward pondering their lot: “I could hear the genetic chit-chat of my hormones.” At a party, one of Abbott’s men spots the woman of his fantasies and declares, “My heart shot to my neck like a squirrel, all claws and climbing.” And then comes this sad observation: “In my part of the world, people suffer horribly from love.” Ditto in ours. Many of Abbott’s people speak alike, and their speech has little corre- spondence to our actual world, but that’s because they live in this awkward wasteland Abbott has constructed for them. And, oddly enough, they are com- fortable there: his people are altogether themselves and wouldn’t be capable of recognizing a different realm if they suddenly found themselves in one. Abbott’s plots unfold in an eerie, dreamlike haze of booze, narcotics, and disap- pointment—“I had eight thoughts, then eighty, several of which had to do with drinking and the truths you find doing it.” And yet never does one suspect that Abbott is penning anything other than grainy realism, except that he molds his planet as would an insane god and then rules over it with just as much mad- ness. Writing is one of the only methods a person has of approaching godliness: in the beginning was the word. In “Love and the Hurt of It,” one of Abbott’s funniest stories, the protago- nist Dallas has a Casanova effect on females—all females, prepubescent and postmenstrual alike. Groups of them pounce on him like ravenous Bacchae wherever he travels; old girlfriends break his bones, bruise him, and make him bleed. Dallas is at once lovable, dopey, and, like all of Abbott’s people, metaphysically minded. Is this permissible? Are fiction writers who are ostensibly realists—that is, those who have no stock in the supernatural, the fabulist, or the satiri- cal—allowed to compose a world of characters in situations whose nexus to our own is untenable or shaky at best? I hope so, or else we’ll have to trash half of the serious American fiction ever written, starting with most of Mark Twain and moving on into Yoknapatawpha County.